In 1982, hot on the heels of their new album English Settlement, it seemed as if the world might belong to the Swindon-born band XTC. Songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding had been playing together for a decade, part of the glam scene of the early ’70s, then mutating through punk and new wave to forge a sound and genre not quite like any other group’s. “Senses Working Overtime,” a single from that album, charted internationally, making the UK top 10 and earning wide airplay in Europe, North America, and Australia. The album did not sell widely in the United States, but that was an accident of history: XTC had prepared a major tour, but Partridge fell ill, suffering a nervous breakdown that manifested itself as stage fright. The band played just one show, in San Diego, and then returned to England, where, borrowing a page from The Beatles, an obvious and major influence, it no longer toured or played live apart from the occasional radio and television appearance. And so it was that XTC became a band highly esteemed by other songwriters and musicians, but not much heard—a minor tragedy, one might say, and particularly given the band’s acrimonious dissolution just a few years ago, after a quarter-century of playing together.

Here are moments from happier days. The first clip has XTC performing “Senses Working Overtime” on British television. The second captures a particularly energetic Partridge onstage leading “Respectable Street,” one of the finest moments in the 1981 documentary Urgh! A Music War. The third captures a live performance in 1989, seven years after that disastrous tour, on David Letterman‘s old NBC television show. The song is “King for a Day,” a station from which Partridge and company demoted themselves with the closing cut, the Avengers-themed “Mayor of Simpleton.”